Despite the deluge of other shopkeep simulators and crafting games, the Atelier series has something like a comforting warm blanket. It’s a long-running RPG series that tends to focus more on the day-to-day life of being an alchemist and creating goods for the common folk. While the series has shied away from the mundane as the series has gone on, the spirit of creativity and crafting remains at its core. After a three-game run with Ryza Stout, Gust has finally introduced the latest entry in the series with Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land.
As is the case with most of the subseries of Atelier, players don’t necessarily need to play any of the previous titles to fully comprehend the setting or core gameplay mechanics. That’s in part due to most Atelier trilogies mixing up the combat and crafting mechanics from one series to the next, and Atelier Yumia is no exception. The tough constraints of taking time to craft against an ever-dwindling calendar are long gone, and so much of Atelier’s focus this time around is on the adventure outside of the atelier rather than the mysteries within.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land centers around the titular Yumia Liessfeldt, an already somewhat established alchemist who’s been dabbling in the taboo arts that once sought the great kingdom of Aladiss ruin. In her role as the junior member of an exploratory group put together to explore abandoned ruins and learn the mysteries of what happened, she’s often stigmatized for her craft. There’s good reason for many of these expeditionary forces to be wary of her, as alchemy had led to a number of great catastrophes in their lifetime. Nevertheless, Yumia’s goal in all of this is to uncover the mysteries of just what happened to make alchemy such a feared topic and track down her missing mother in the process.
The open world of Atelier Yumia is filled with so many little landmarks and items to gather that you can barely walk ten feet without bumping into another point of interest. In my OCD nature, I found myself aiming to reach 100% of each of the continent’s four regions for both achievements and a sense of completion. From locked treasure chests to small shrines of power that need basic logic puzzles completed before they confer their skill points to Yumia, there are often times too many little side diversions that keep the player from following along with Atelier Yumia’s storyline. In many ways, Gust shows its influence from the likes of Genshin Impact and tries to capture some of that Chinese title’s energy and design. When there’s no time limit to finish the story and bag space large enough to fit the materials of an entire house in your bag, there’s little reason not to just wander the open plains of Aladiss, beat up a Puni or two, and just spend the afternoon ticking off completion checkmarks for every little node that pops up on the map.
Something I didn’t realize until my thirtieth hour of playing Atelier Yumia is that the expeditionary force has a small checklist of activities they would like Yumia to take care of for them in each region as part of their Pioneering Effort. These range from using a specific item or character skill in combat to crafting specific pieces of furniture and the like. Initially, I thought these were just another way to gain experience and skill points, but I finally realized that completing this evergrowing checklist in each region, at least in the case of the first two, unlocks special ammo for Yumia’s gunstaff that can be used to break some of the barriers in her path. If you come across marbled walls that seem brittle to the touch or a spider’s web blocking access to a treasure chest, that’s how Yumia comes across these different ammo types.
One thing that I wish I had known sooner was that she has to return to the leader of the expeditionary force each time she crosses the 10% threshold on the completion list to cash in her current progress, earn a small reward, and unlock the next tier of objectives. Only by completing this list to 100% in a given region does Yumia unlock the special ammo or other tool to aid in her adventure. There isn’t a quest marker or anything obvious to guide the player, so it’s worth checking up on the expedition team once in a while if you feel like you’ve done enough to further the cause.
Combat in the Atelier series has typically been a turn-based affair, or at least something more methodical. Atelier Yumia mixes up the formula by instead turning the entire focus of combat into an action affair. Yumia and her two party members can all act independently (with some AI strategies for the characters not actively being controlled) and attack the enemy all at once. Rather than being able to freely run around the battlefield, Yumia fights the enemy by circling around them in two set planes where she can fight from either short or long range with a single button press jumping between the two distances. Players can strafe around the enemy or block attacks, with perfectly timed defensive moves giving a powerful counterattack.
Yumia and her crew don’t have your standard attack and separate skill commands, but rather, all four of their attack commands are skills unique to that character and differ depending on if they’re approaching the enemy from short or long range. Each skill has a set number of uses before it needs to recharge over time, so players have to manage whether they want to burst all of their damage at once or play conservatively and keep a couple of skills on reserve for a precision counterattack. The items Yumia crafts operate in a similar fashion and are just a quick button press away to swap from skills to items. Yumia can carry four different attack items into combat, and much like other Atelier games, understanding the crafting system to make overpowered weapons is, while not required, sometimes the most enjoyable way to play as it makes combat little more than a formality. By the time I was set to venture off between the second and third biomes of Aladiss, I already had a wind boomerang and massive ice hammer that could hit for somewhere in the region of 5,000-12,000 damage, depending on the enemy’s weakness.
Another strange oddity to Atelier Yumia’s combat that helped turn the combat into a breeze was the actual EXP rate. It wasn’t uncommon for me to go two, maybe three fights at a time between leveling up. My concerns of only having two or so combat skills available from my preview of Atelier Yumia last month were quickly resolved as I was already close to level 40 before even setting foot in the Atelier for the first time. It’s hard to say whether this was an intentional growth rate or merely the unintended side effect of testing out the various difficulty levels and the one EXP-boosting accessory I could craft early on. Regardless, I hit the level cap of 100 midway through the second biome of Aladiss and only had to worry about crafting stronger armor and combat items for the growth of my party. Grinding never felt like it was necessary with how quickly I was leveling up, although I did see myself hunting down a few specific enemy types over and over to gather up their raw materials for crafting.
The actual art of crafting items in your atelier is something that sets this alchemy RPG series apart from one another, even in terms of individual trilogies. Where Yumia draws her inspiration from are memories of items, remembering the base materials they’re made from and combining those raw goods with an elemental alchemy core to recreate the image in her mind rather than throwing it all together in a massive melting pot as is series tradition. This allows Yumia to craft simpler things on the go, from bandages and repair kits to the various ammo types for her gunstaff. More complex items, i.e., anything usable in battle, do require the use of an atelier or at least a mobile crafting station she can put down in any of the buildable campsites around Aladiss. There’s a strange minigame to crafting, where Yumia has to install the raw materials into her alchemy core and use the resonance area that each material has to capture stray mana particles and make the particular item stronger based on a number of arbitrary factors per recipe. If all of this sounds too complex, players can just push the touchpad when beginning a recipe and pick whether they want a high-quality item with stronger innate effects or the bare minimum made with the cheapest materials possible.
Building campsites and rest stations across Aladiss in also a simple automatically guided affair if you want it to be. Sure, you can build yourself the crafting stations and meticulously craft your ideal atelier on the go and build everything from the walls to the individual chairs yourself, or there are prefab recipe guides where you can just throw your extra wood and metal resources in at once and come out with a perfectly functional two-story abode. It’s a nice touch for those who like to fully immerse themselves in the RPG and show off their own style, but in a single-player JRPG with no way to share your creations outside of posting screenshots on social media, may be a bit much for the average gamer.
Calling Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land a guided JRPG experience is probably the best way to recommend this title to others. Everything bar the combat has been streamlined and simplified to make this entry the most approachable one to date for newcomers. Series veterans might not find much of a challenge to this mystery, but Gust has put together a solid first experience to bring the long-running alchemy RPG series to Xbox.
[Editor’s Note: Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro platform. Review code was provided by the publisher.]
